I have seen two inappropriate jokes, ‘too-soon’ jokes about these deaths where young people fall from buildings while attending a party.
One said, “penye imefika, kama bash haiko ground floor, usiende haki.’
And another one was a video captioned that you need a parachute if you are attending a party that is anywhere above the ground floor.
I am not the biggest fan of house parties, but I have attended a dozen enough to know that if something can go wrong, a party where young people are gathered with alcohol is the best place for something to go wrong.
I have seen people piss on themselves at parties, I have seen puke bad stuff at parties, I have seen people soil themselves at parties, I have seen people who zone off and operate on airplane mode for like three days after three days of nonstop drinking. I have seen worse mistakes.
What scares me is the total lack of self-awareness among many people, young and old. Some people operate like vagabonds, high on substances, totally unaware of who or where they are, and they are OK. They survive on their grandmother’s prayers.
There are people who can attend a party in Kinoo, where they know only one person. Next weekend they will attend a party in some mansion 17 kilometres from Rongai. At such a house, they are friends of a friend to a friend of the host. Next weekend they are in Umoja in a house where nobody seems to know who they are.
There are women for whom, this is their lifestyle.
Man. The number of women I have met stranded inside clubs, outside clubs, in footpaths, in town, in estates can break your heart. You meet a young woman in her 20s, skimpily dressed headed to a party or from a party where she has been thrown out, her phone stolen, and high as a kite, and she is either asking for fare or a lift.
This is a sensitive subject to address, lest you end up being labeled, but what I know, every weekend, there are so many good men who either pay for strange women’s Uber or bus fare. There are many Uber drivers who drop stranded women at their homes and don’t ask even for a single coin. The discussion I have had with older Uber drivers always goes like this, “These are our daughters, and they need to be guided.” If you turn to trashy YouTube, you will see women confessing the things they have done when stranded or drunk. Still not many women are lucky to be rescued to consciously negotiate their way out of trouble.
Every other day, I see young men lying in trenches. In every male circle, there are men who can’t handle their liquor. We know those friends who drink and can sleep on anything including inside a kitchen sink. I have heard of men who have woken up to the realization that they may have been violated.
Jokes, macabre humour, and memes are how we make sense of what is increasingly becoming a dystopian and Kafkaesque reality.
In the last 15 years or so, alcohol consumption, drug use, and abuse have progressively and objectively gotten worse. There is so much money moving around Nairobi making Nairobi a continuous partying scene. There is so much poverty and unemployment-related stress anxiety, and angst, driving people to seek cheap escapism in alcohol and drugs. Also, there is a pervasive nihilism that drives young people into the vice culture. When there is no clear pathway to success in the future, it becomes a hard pill to swallow.
It used to be in your 20s you would finish college, get a job or get into business, start a family, build a home, retire, and die. Nowadays college education guarantees heartbreak than not even attending college. Many young people are unemployed, underemployed, underpaid, and living from hand to mouth. Family is no longer guaranteed, every year the number of single mothers multiplies, and the fathers take off or are too poor to offer any meaning to the life of the child. Not to mention irresponsible fathers. We have many single mothers shouldering the burden of provision, and sometimes you have to understand some need a blunt or a dozen bottles of ciders to try and make sense of the world.
So, parties symbolize the decadence that pervades our society. And our anger towards the many unnecessary deaths of young people is a cry for self-correction.
Self-correction starts with an individual, from a family, from friends, and then collectively as a society.
In 2010, or thereabouts, in a scuffle between AFC Leopards and Gor Mahia, a few individuals died. One of them was a student at The University of Nairobi. I was a student leader and was tasked with securing some funds and a bus to ferry some students to his funeral. I remember when we went to visit Father Dominic Wamugunda, then the dean of students, and he sat us down and asked us, “Since when did life become so cheap? How do you go to watch a football match and then you die?” He spoke, not as a priest, but as a biological and social father.
Our collective anger and fury towards Jeff’s death and widespread condemnation of DJ Faxto is a call for a society that needs redemption. I am one of those people who skeptically believe that the DJ could be innocent. Because in any party environment, anything can happen. Anything can go wrong. But we cried the same way we mourned the Kianjokoma brothers taken by the police bullet at the height of Covid-19. Because life is not cheap. Life must have dignity. And death must not come cheap.
And here comes an uncomfortable part.
Self-correction must start from the self. When you venture out to that party, know your alcohol and drug tolerance levels. Don’t outsource your safety to your friends who in any case could be too intoxicated to be helpful. Know the state of your mental health. I have been in spaces where people displayed erratic behaviour and even turned violent, and had to be restrained. We woke up the following morning only to be told, they are on a spectrum. Imagine being provoked at a party, you knock someone, uchapwe, and a mistake happens you die? Whether a girl or a boy, try and know yourself, your safety in any environment is your sole responsibility. If something bad happens, let it be it was totally beyond your control. Anything bad that happens at a party can be avoided if each individual has enough self-awareness.
Next, we must be our brother’s keeper. About 99 percent of the time, we do our best to ensure our friends are safe in a party environment, get home safe after a party and can offer necessary first-aid in the event of something bad. We must be permanently vigilant. We must be ready to weed out any creeps in our midst and be ready to intervene when we notice someone is going about the gin a bit too hard.
Next, if you are the host, you must never get high. Everything that happens in your house is your sole responsibility. You must see the vet who gets into your house. You must study and see which individual is likely to be a source of problems and be firm with them. Alcohol is not an excuse for bad behavior, yet it is a convenient scapegoat.
We all love a good time but try and do these things out there. Host fewer and fewer bashes in your house. Your house is a sanctuary.
For me, I have grown to hate alcoholic conversations, especially, those meaningless shouting matches that no one remembers the following day. I am more at home in a home environment, with a mature crowd that knows when to call a night, or where there is zero potential of anything going wrong. I hate babysitting adults, and increasingly more impatient, I skip crowds where I am likely to end up cleaning the mess, like dropping drunk people in their homes, separating a fist fight, or cleaning up crap someone threw up.